Right, I have re-installed my Wordpress. Was fed up with it, so removed and restarted. Have also added it to Technorati at last! Also, Bad Behaviour not working too well, so added Spam Karma. Let’s see how good it is!
As those on you on Twitter may know, I have a Spam problem. It’s not nice, it renders me not fun to be around, I don’t know if it’s contagious, but it’s still not pleasant. So today, with 5 mins to spare, I decided to install the Bad Behaviour Wordpress Plugin. 10 minutes in and no Spam! I wonder if this will cure me of my horrible, anti-social disease and make more more fun to be around?
I’ve just read a couple of interesting articles whilst having my miso soup over lunch:
Both offing good advice about roughly the same thing, but coming from different directions.
"How hard could it be?" offers a blueprint for software failure within a small to medium sized development team so the mistakes aren’t replicated, where as "Process and the mISV" notes some points to developing software when working on your own.
As ibrow is effectively just me most of the time, but also as someone who uses freelancers, both these articles were of interest to me. Whilst most of the issues raised by the two articles, I should already know, it is to be reminded, as sometimes when up to your eyeballs in work it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. A tip that I’d never thought of, especially if in a development team of one, was holding a Business and Technical review
Hold weekly business and technical reviews When you’re starting a business on your own, it can be hard to see the big picture. Why not devote two hours a week to self-review? Sit down with a pad and a big cup of coffee and ask yourself: What have I done right? What have I done wrong? How do I do better? from Process and the mISVAnother good bit of advice was from Joel’s article:
Mistake No. 2: Set weekly milestones. … [developers] need to draw up detailed plans before they start writing code. … When you ask developers for one, however, many of them will respond by creating a schedule that breaks pieces of the process into weeks. This may seem perfectly reasonable, but it’s not. If you let a software team submit a schedule with big chunky estimates of time (by big I mean more than two days of work), you can be almost certain that they’re not considering every detail that needs to be implemented, and those details will add up to a huge delay. from How hard could it be?
As a self employed developer, it is often far too easy to get wrapped up in the "must do this now" and "so much work todo" mentality, without thinking about the larger goals. Certainly spending a couple of hours each week away from the computer, have a coffee and really plan what the important things are, both this week, and beyond would be beneficial to both me and my business. I think it was Seth Godin who said (paraphrasing now, I have his "Small is the New Big" book) "do the important things first.".
Well, I think the moral is to work out what the important things are, but not just work orientated.
I am in a bit of a quandary, and hopefully someone out there has the answer.
I have an idea for a little web app. It’s not an amazing idea, nothing new or ground breaking, and there are already several products out there that do almost what I want. But not quite. Which is why I’m contemplating building it myself. When built this app will certainly fill a hole for my business, and I should think a couple of my clients. My idea is to eventually host this web app for others to use, charging a small amount of subscription.
So far so good, but the idea itself isn’t the quandary, it’s the licence.
As stated there is nothing new or ground breaking in this actual project, which is why I am thinking of adopting an Open Source licence. My reasoning for this is simply that once finished, and if I decide to turn it into a hosted web app, pretty much anyone would be able to subscribe, see it’s features and within a couple of weeks have a clone. As this is the case, why not open it out to begin with? By opening it up, everyone can benefit from the code, and the only competition (I can imagine) will be who has the better service (daily backups, customer support etc), which in my opinion is the most important thing as far as a web app goes.
But here comes the stumbling block. Which Open Source licence allows for this sort of usage? After doing a lot of searching and reading, I’m still not entirely sure.
Here’s my check point list of things that I need to cover:
What I certainly do not want to do, nor be accused of is to Open Source my project as a marketing gimmick or to get free (as in beer) labour from the Open Source community which I then sell on and take all the profit. The Open Source community has been hugely beneficial to me over the past decade, and at last I’m in a position that I can hopefully provide something of use back.
Many thanks for your time, and I’m looking forward to any replies
Sites and pages that have been useful
How very exciting. My ReallySimpleContentCache class has just been approved for PhpClasses.Org
You can see the ReallySimpleContentCache class page here, and also the trackback url is here
One day when I have time I’ll write up a little tutorial for this, but not today - England play France!
During the usual browsing that happens when looking for ajax/javascript/php/development/etc/etc/etc stuff, I came across this article:
Open source social platforms available today: 10 of the greatest
Seemed like a pretty interesting list and Ajax Flakes looks like a site worth watching.
One day, when I find the time I’d love to help out with a few open source projects, and these look like a good a place to start as any. Who knows, I might make Qwango open source one day?? Also when I have the time, I might do a quick "why I love open source" post. But this seems to be in the realms of fantasy right now. Oh well
I have built a (as the title suggests) really simple content caching class in PHP. I had a particular itch I wished to scratch today, and the ReallySimpleContentCaching class is the result.
I am currently working on a project that has a Flash front end that communicates with PHP in the backend via XML. Based on what is passed in the XML, PHP goes off interrogates a database, generated an XML reply. The building of this XML reply can be quite complicated and make a lot of DB calls. Also, it might be high load and therefore impact on performance.
The solution is caching.
There are a lot of caching methods out there, Smarty has excellent built in caching, and there is PHP Output Buffering. But my needs were to small to warrant Smarty and I was not caching the output, So I built my own little class.
You can see an example of it in action here. Note: This is a very boring page!
You can also download the source code for the ReallySimpleContentCaching class and associated files here (zip file).
I have tried to include as much commenting as possible so you can see what I did. (As ever) I will try to get around to writing a brief tutorial on this if I have time.
But otherwise, download, play with it, improve it and enjoy.
